Daily Tip: How to update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to iOS 5

New to these giant software releases and wondering how to upgrade your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to iOS 5? Luckily iTunes makes the process of upgrading painless. The best part is once you're on iOS 5 you can start to receive OTA updates and you'll never have to fuss with cables and computers again.

For now though, where you're ready to update to iOS 5, here's what you need to do:

Plug your current iPhone into your computer and open iTunes. Your phone should start to sync and backup automagically.

If it doesn't start to sync automatically, click the Sync button in order to back up your device. (You can alternately right click your device name in the navigation bar and click back up as well. Either way will work just fine.)

iTunes may prompt you that an update is available. If it does just click update after you've backed up your device (iTunes will also prompt you to back up if you haven't already.)

If it doesn't, click Check for Update under the Version section.

The new software will start to download and then install. Your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad will restart. Don't worry about it. Let iTunes do it's thing and update your device to iOS 5.

Once it's done updating, iTunes should prompt you to do one of two things - set up as a new device or restore from a backup. Choose to restore from a backup and select the backup you just made.

Once the restore is done your device will reboot. When iTunes detects it again it will start to sync back any apps and games your old iPhone had installed.

After you've done the initial manual update to iOS 5 you'll have the option to use iCloud backups in the future. Do it. It's free and it just works.

If you have any questions or have issues, check out our TiPb Forums for all the help you could ever need!

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It's almost 1:30 am in California and I've only been able to download iTunes update. :( was looking forward to trying out new iOS tonight on iPhone and hooking up iPad for trying it out when I wake up. Oh well...

Hiya,
Quick Question...
I'm selling my 3GS which was running 4.3.5 and getting the 4S on Friday.
I've done a backup and restore and setup as new on my 3GS and am sending it in the post tomorrow.
Question is-when i plug my new 4S into my iTunes-will i try to restore from my 4.3.5 software or rather import all my settings into ios 5?
Thanks

It was a royal pain to upgrade. I had to update iTunes first on my windows XP PC. Then it wouldn't sync with my iPhone without any upgrade.
Then I rebooted. OK now it will back up but it won't upgrade. Finally I reboot a second time. Now it will upgrade my iPad (original) but my iPhone fails to upgrade.
One more reboot and I can upgrade my iPhone.
What a pain!

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Doesn't work for me. iPhone tries to do a "backup" that never completes from my PC version of iTunes when attempting the iOS 5.0 update and it therefore never makes it to the new version 5.0 update itself. This is even the case after I manually force it to do a backup, which seems to complete quickly when its the only thing running. But when invoked during the update function, it hangs up and my CPU max'es out, even though its a new AMD Athlon II processor (less than a year old). Not sure what's up with this... Everything else seems to work fine and the diagnostics says everything is okay.

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